Sông Bé: A Legacy of Vietnam is a factually-based narrative told in flashback from a present-day evening concert at the New Orleans Orpheum Theater. It features a fit, world-renowned architect, Richard Foxworth, a West Point graduate, who reacts to what his wife finds in his old Army footlocker. It triggers long-buried memories of his role as a second lieutenant in the Vietnam War Tet Offensive battle of Sông Bé in 1968, the physical wounds he sustained in the battle, his treatment at Rollingwood Sanitarium for post-traumatic stress, the dream that haunted him nightly after the battle, and the emotional loss of a West Point classmate. Threaded through the story is a history of the American civil rights movement since the 1950s.
The factual bases of the story derive from the author's research and experiences as the son of a career Army officer, the first of three brothers to graduate from West Point, a Vietnam War veteran, serving as an Army aviator in the Middle East, as an engineer, the founder of an international consulting company, the Chief Strategy Officer for Ion Power Group LLC, and as an adjunct professor at Southern Methodist University and the United States Military Academy.
Born in 1945, a month after V-J Day, he has always seen himself as part of a generation that grew up in a time of great change and hope for a brighter and more equal world, those espousing racial equality being increasingly heard.
As to the authenticity of the military and battle elements of the story, as well as to the Battle of Sông Bé specifically, five months after graduating from West Point in June 1967, Rich Adams was one of the first in the Class of 1967 to serve in the Vietnam War and fought in the Battle of Sông Bé on February 18, 1968, during the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive. Prior to deployment to Vietnam to serve with the 101st Airborne Division as a forward observer and fire direction officer for an artillery battery, he shared a barracks room with an African-American lieutenant for Airborne training. The man responded to him at the end of the first week of airborne school as Redman does in Sông Bé when queried by Foxworth if he wanted to go with the guys into Columbus, Georgia, for a few beers and to blow off some steam ... it wasn't going to happen.
Relevant to the story, Rich Adams served as a Casualty Assistance Officer to a family suffering the loss of a husband and father killed in Vietnam, and prior to resigning from the military in 1974, he administered the race relations program and unit-wide race relations seminars for a major U.S. command in Germany, the 24th Engineer Group, during a time of intense racial unrest within the military.
